Political Opinions in Literature: Identifying Themes in International Compositions - PowerPoint Presentation

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Political Opinions in Literature: Identifying Themes in International Compositions

Robert Cai, Matthew Carr, Adam Elrafei, Alexander Goniprow, Adrian Hamins-Puertolas, Manpreet Khural, Andrew Li, Alexandra Winter, Soumya Yanamandra, Dan Yang, and Kay Zhang

Mentor: Dr. Peter Mallios Librarian: Tim Hackman

Team POLITICSlide2

Background

In schools, there are many books teachers use, but we only use a select few – why are these books chosen? What makes them so special? We believe that there is a relationship between government and the reception of books we read. We may read the books we read because there is a political background to them.

Since the United States is a democracy, the citizens’ perception of foreign countries has a direct  relationship with foreign policies enactedA thorough understanding of how the public gathers its perceptions of foreign cultures is crucial to navigating diplomatic crises

To become a better-informed political citizen of the United States, one must learn to think critically about the uses of foreign literatureSlide3

The big question

Did reception of Russian novels and authors in the United States and United States foreign policy toward Russia  reflect each other from 1900-1923?

HypothesisReception of Russian literature in the United States significantly correlates with United States policies toward Russia

Inherent ties between literary evaluation and political understandingDefining this reception through public mass media print – we believe this is a good representation of receptionSlide4

Why?

Foreign literature is very important

Relationship between societal attitude and interpretation of foreign literature to support it (Griswold)Foreign literature is one important medium that exposes the United States to the political and cultural ideologies of other countries (Griswold 1077)

Literary evaluation is “not an activity that is performed outside of political struggles… but arises from them” (Tompkins)

Why Literature?Slide5

Russia, 1900-1923

Upper bound of 1923

All preceding publications are in the public domain and we can publicly release all collected data, articles after 1923 are bound by copyright – anyone can use these articles in this time frame so the database will be very easily improved upon – we are willing to go beyond this bound for a larger sample sizeLower bound of 1900

Guarantee that a significant number of periodicals for examination will be available

Russia was a focal point of the US from 1900-1923

Time period contained relatively small number of significant Russian authors whose works were available in English

World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the threat of communism led to increased interest in Russia

Russia is still politically relevant to US foreign policy today

Major international power

There is research concerning England, but not much regarding Russia

Why 1900-1923?

Why Russia?Slide6

Literature ReviewSlide7

Previous Studies

These slides are research that we conducted to support our methodology

Emerson analyzed Leo Tolstoy’s views on war through a close reading of his many texts (1855)Only looked at themes

Goldfarb studied how a prominent literary critic, William Dean Howells, supported Tolstoy’s works in the United States during the 1900s (318)Only one who looked at reception, but only through one critic – very limited study

Only a few studies address Russian literary reception in the United States during the early twentieth century

We intend to expand on such studies by using comprehensive statistical tools to analyze a wider base of reception materialSlide8

Canon Formation and Politics

The idea of a national literature emerged in the late eighteenth century as a way of proving cultural independence on an international level (Corse,

Nationalism and Literature 7-14)Theories of canon formation state novels have to experience a conjunction of large sales and certain types of recognition to reach canonical status (Ohmann 206)

We’re looking at wide readership articles for our reception analysis – very public, mass media articles – something to describe all of US in order to understand which authors were prominent during this time periodSlide9

Topic Modeling

Researchers use topic modeling to analyze large corpora of data

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a more specific type of topic modeling, asserts each document from a larger corpus consists of a plurality of topics (Chaney and Blei 2)Topics Over Time (TOT) model is able to predict the timestamps of documents and generates topics that are “more distinct from each other than LDA topics” (Wang and McCallum 5)

In our research, we will also use a TOT model to  analyze Russian literature and  political documents as a function of timeSlide10

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis focuses on the opinion expressed about the subject matter of the data (Lee and Pang 1)

For our project, sentiment analysis methods will allow us to quickly categorize articles by gauging the overall opinions of Russian authors and novels during different time periodsIn addition, incorporating a sentiment categorization into our database will allow future researchers to quickly add to and examine our dataSlide11

Foreign Policy

Many previous studies have determined United States foreign policy towards various nations by analyzing its components

Rick Travis analyzes foreign policy towards Africa by focusing on foreign aid to the continent (798)Haslam focuses on direct foreign investment and the corresponding treaties to determine United States foreign policy toward other nations (1182)

For our study, we will gather data on “exports, imports, investments, arms sales, and categories of foreign aid (bilateral, aggregate, and per capita)” between the United States and the Russian Empire to define United States foreign policy (Watson 253)Slide12

MethodologySlide13

Selecting Authors

We compiled a list of all Russian literary figures whose works had English translations during our time period of interest

Using that list, we cataloged the number of search results found in the Readers’ Guide Retrospective for each literary figure of interestFrom this preliminary summary of the availability of periodicals in the United States specifically discussing Russian literary figures, we chose to investigate Dostoevsky and TolstoySlide14

Database

Russian Literature Database

Reader’s Guide Retrospective

Foreign Policy Database

Journal articles

StatisticsSlide15

Scanning

We will digitize physical or microfilm versions of articles

We are currently scanning articles by using publicly available resources at the University of Maryland  McKeldin LibraryWe have standardized scanning techniques and settings to reduce preventable variations in image quality and size

Once saved, the file is left unmodified with the exception of cropping. The team will not manipulate images after scanning to retain the original image data, quality, and integritySlide16

Article Processing

We will convert these files to readable documents through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software

We are using ABBYY FineReader 11 to save the files as plain text documents, DjVu files, and FineReader documentsTopic modeling and sentiment analysis software analyze plain text filesDjVu format compresses documents and maintains the layout of text on each page

Save FineReader files to document the transition from scanned image to readable text

At this stage, we remove pictures from the pagesSlide17

Manual Annotation

We will annotate the articles to generate metadata, information that computers cannot answer and that require human analysis

For the Russian literature database, the questions will focus on the discourse surrounding the predominant Russian authors occurring across the United StatesExample questions:Was an author liked or disliked?

If the author was disliked, were any counter arguments presented?

Was an author compared or contrasted with the United States?

If the author was compared to the United States, was the author’s literary style or viewpoints on issues mostly discussed?

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Automated Annotation

TAPoR – Keyword frequencies

Basic article analysisShalmaneser Tool (Parsing analysis) – Semantic parsingTakes sentences and puts them under frames

Helps us understand what types of sentences are used in an article

Articles with heavy judgment/assessment frames are heavily opinionated

Probabilistic Topics Modeling

Unsupervised – LDA – assigns words to a topic, uses different probability sequence to determine what topics are most important in the article, we’ll be able to attach certain topics to certain articles

Supervised – we give the algorithm our annotation form, giving it the topics we are specifically looking for, we will run this and get how frequently the topics are in the articles

End goal - databases will be completely annotated by the computerSlide19

Data Analysis

Draw qualitative conclusions from trends we will find in our data

Trends will have substantial quantitative backingTrends over time, sentiment, topics, authorsCompare trends between Russian Literature and Foreign Policy databases

We hope to find a correlation between US reception of Russian authors with US foreign policySlide20

Conclusion

Foreign novels are an inherent part of United States culture

If one were to ignore the presence of foreign literature in United States politics, then one would be ignoring a major factor that shaped both the citizens and government of the United StatesWe are pioneering relatively new software and technology in the realm of literary analysis

Over time, our foundation will pave the way to understanding overall patterns in foreign literature receptionSlide21

Timeline for Success

Spring ‘12

Complete Website

Continue Literature Review

Begin Scanning and Annotating

Begin Coordination with MITH

Summer ‘12

Continue Scanning and Annotating

Fall ‘12

Prepare for Junior Colloquium

Determine methods to quantify American foreign policies

Spring ’13

Present at Undergraduate Research Day

Begin drafting thesisSlide22

Timeline for Success

(cont.)

Summer ’13

Continue drafting thesis

Fall ’13

Obtain thesis feedback from Mallios

Gather data for foreign policy

Draw conclusions between the databases

Winter ‘13-14

Prepare presentation for Thesis Conference

Revise and edit thesis

Spring ’14

Present at Senior Thesis ConferenceSlide23

References

Chaney, Allison J.B., and David M. Blei. “Visualizing Topic Models.”

International AAAI Conference on Social Media and Weblogs. Princeton U Dept. of Computer Science, 2012. Web. 15 Mar. 2012.Corse, Sarah M. 

Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.

Emerson, Caryl. "Leo Tolstoy On Peace And War."

PMLA: Publications Of The Modern

Language Association Of America

124.5 (2009): 1855-58.

Academic Search Premier

. Web. 15 Mar. 2012.

Goldfarb, Charles. “William Dean Howells: An American Reaction to Tolstoy.”

Comparative Literature Studies

8.4 (1971): 317-37.

JSTOR.

Web. 12 Mar. 2012.

Griswold, Wendy. "The Fabrication of Meaning: Literary Interpretation in the United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies."

American Journal

of Sociology

92.5 (1987): 1077-115.

JSTOR.

Web. 13 Sept. 2011.

Haslam, Paul Alexander. "The Evolution of the Foreign Direct Investment Regime in the Americas."

Third World Quarterly

31.7 (2010): 1181-203.

Academic Search Premier

. Web. 27 Nov. 2011.

Lee, Lillian, and Bo Pang. “Sentiment of Two Women: Sentiment Analysis and Social Media.” 1900 University Avenue, Cornell University, New York. 22 Mar. 2011. Lecture.

Ohmann, Richard. "The Shaping Of A Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975."

Critical Inquiry

10.1

Tompkins, Jane.

Sensational Designs: the Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Print.

Travis, Rick. "Problems, Politics, and Policy Streams: A Reconsideration US Foreign Aid Behavior toward Africa."

International Studies Quarterly

54.3 (2010): 797-821.

Academic Search Premier

. Web. 27 Nov. 2011.

Wang, Xuerui, and Andrew McCallum. “Topics over Time: A Non-Markov Continuous-Time Model of Topical Trends.” U of Massachusetts Dept. of Computer Science, 2006. Web. 15 Mar. 2012.

Watson, Robert P., and Sean McCluskie. "Human Rights Considerations and U.S. Foreign Policy: The Latin American Experience."

Social Science Journal

34.2 (1997): 249-57.

Academic Search Premier

. Web. 27 Nov. 2011.

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Acknowledgements

Dr. Peter Mallios

Mr. Tim Hackman Maryland Institute for Technology in the HumanitiesForeign Literatures in America Project

Gemstone Program StaffSlide25

Questions?